I’ve seen people drink Champagne with fried chicken, dark rum with jerk pork and Scotch with steak. In decadent moods, I’m partial to opening a bottle of Barolo with my favorite roast beef po-boy. But I’ve never witnessed anyone drinking anything other than beer (or soft drinks) at a crawfish boil.

As Karlos Knott puts it, “Nothing else really makes sense.”

Knott is the president of Bayou Teche Brewing, the craft brewer in Arnaudville. He and most of his family live “within 30 seconds” of the old family farm where he started brewing LA 31 Bière Pâle out of a discarded railway car back in 2009. The railcar is still there, but it’s next door to a much larger brewing facility that Knott likes to think is a testament to his belief that nothing goes better with south Louisiana cuisine than beer brewed in south Louisiana.

“We outgrew that railcar pretty quick,” Knott said during an informal tour of Bayou Teche Brewing last month. “There’s a lot of demand. People want to drink good beer with this food.”

Bayou Teche had just released what is almost certainly the first commercial beer specifically brewed to complement boiled crawfish: Saison D’Ecrivisses. That's Knott in the video above, talking about the beer in Bayou Teche's tasting room.

There are crawfish ponds on the Bayou Teche property. Knott says the harvest mainly goes to personal use. Saison D’Ecrivisses (that’s French for crawfish) was developed after brewmaster Gar Hatcher experimented with small batches of beer he made for the frequent crawfish boils held at the brewery.

“It’s got a lot of spiciness,” Knott said of the Belgian-style saison. The beer is made with rye malt and fermented with Belgian yeast, which Knott said accounts for its peppery finish. “We could see people putting some of the beer right into the boil,” Knott said.

Saison D’Ecrivisses is available either on tap or in large format bottles only during crawfish season (roughly January to June).